Occidental hero

Born in Istanbul to a wealthy family, Orhan Pamuk abandoned architecture studies to write his first book, but struggled to find a publisher. Now Turkey's best-selling novelist, his newly translated Snow depicts a military coup. His opposition to the Rushdie fatwa and support for the Kurds means he is seen by some as a political renegade, but he remains outspoken. Nicholas Wroe reports

Pamuk could face up to three years in prison. Photo: Eamonn McCabe/Guardian

In 1994, billboards appeared all over Istanbul bearing the words: "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." They formed part of an advertising campaign for Orhan Pamuk's novel of that year, The New Life, and the phrase was the book's opening line. The marketing of popular fiction in this way is nothing new -although it was innovative in Turkey at the time - but what made the approach so unusual was that Pamuk's writing would not be immediately recognisable as the stuff of mass-market campaigns.

John Updike, praising The New Life, said Pamuk "in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust". But Updike also noted that Pamuk was that most unusual of literary creatures, "both a best-selling author and an avant-garde writer". Pamuk's novels exuberantly embrace postmodernist narrative trickery and his work has been compared to Kafka, Borges, Calvino and García Márquez. "I was as surprised as anyone about my sales," he says. "My first novel [Cevdet Bey and His Sons, 1982] sold 2,000 copies in Turkey in the first year. The second [The Quiet House, 1983] sold 8,000 copies, which was very good. But then the third book [The White Castle, 1985] sold 16,000 and the fourth [The Black Book, 1990] 32,000. So I was joking with friends that The New Life would sell 64,000 but it sold 164,000 copies in its first year." It was by some distance the fastest-selling novel in Turkish publishing history and the print run for his next novel, My Name is Red, in 1998, was the largest-ever in Turkey.

The flat where Pamuk writes in Istanbul overlooks the Golden Horn and has views of the Topkapi Palace on one side and the suspension bridge that links Europe and Asia on the other. To the periodic accompaniment of a muezzin's call to prayer from the next-door mosque, he attempts to make sense of his unprecedented commercial success.

"When I was first published, the Marxists and the conservatives and the political Islamists were all fighting against each other and fighting among themselves," he recalls. "So, because I was a newcomer they all kind of welcomed me, although a bit suspiciously. But it meant that I got all the prizes. And then a media boom began in Turkey and suddenly the interest in books was huge."

While this helps to explain the demographics of his success, in artistic terms his work has tapped into the modern Turkish psyche at a most profound level. He acknowledges that a common theme in his books has been "cultural change; living in a westernised fashion in a country that is essentially not western". His work is full of reminiscences and he subtly engages with the past of his characters and their societies. An aggressive westernising agenda has been the dominant official force in Turkish life for more than a century, and Pamuk is a product of a ruling class that has benefited from this regime. But his work, like the world around him, is also marked by the legacy of a longer social, cultural and religious history.

The novelist and journalist Maureen Freely was brought up in Istanbul as a contemporary of Pamuk's and knew his family. She is also the translator of his latest novel, Snow, which is published in the UK this month. "The rapidity of social change in Turkey has been amazing," she says. "And it has also been a source of considerable pain and confusion. Everything Orhan writes speaks to that and to the debates people are having inside themselves but they can't quite put into words."

Freely adds that while his "modernist/postmodernist games involve using elements from opposing traditions that, when seen together, defy reason and make a 'grand narrative' impossible, they are perhaps less difficult for a modern Turkish reader to understand in that this is their daily experience - living in a part-eastern, part-western culture that changes rapidly - and there is never time to sit back and ask how it all adds up".

Professor Jale Parla of Bilgi University in Istanbul has written extensively about Pamuk. She ascribes his success to his "rare gift of that genius that beguiles at the same time as it challenges. The paradox that he is a 'difficult' best-seller is a myth that is created by the intellectual community in Turkey who are aware of the complexity of his novels but miss their beguiling simplicity." (Parla also acknowledges that there are readers who see only the simplicity and "miss the beguiling".)

In Turkey, the launch of a new Pamuk novel has more in common with the release of a Hollywood film than the publication of a book. There is media saturation and considerable cachet in being seen with his latest work. Although some snipe that he is probably more bought than read, a more serious criticism, usually from a left-nationalist perspective, is that he has sold out to a European audience, a view apparently given added credence when Pamuk was awarded the €100,000 Impac prize last year for My Name is Red.

"When my sales went up my welcome from the Turkish literary scene disappeared," he says. "And I haven't been given any prizes in Turkey since the age of 35. I started to get harsh and envious criticism and I now don't expect to get good reviews any more. For the last few books they haven't even criticised what I have written, instead they criticise the marketing campaign." It is difficult to overestimate his public profile. "If he puts one foot in front of the other it will get into the papers," says one friend. His outspoken stance on the broad human-rights agenda, which has included women's and Kurdish rights, democratic reforms as well as environmentalism, has made him a lightning conductor for criticism.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the radical French student leader-turned Green European MP, first met Pamuk in 2001 on an official visit to Istanbul. He invited Pamuk on to his Swiss television show about books. Cohn-Bendit says Pamuk "was one of the intellectuals who made me understand the importance of Turkey joining the European Union. It is so important for democrats in that country. Orhan is not only one of the most important modern writers in Europe, he is one of the examples of the possible modernity of Turkey."

But for all the contentious stances he has taken, Pamuk rarely deals with political issues head-on in his fiction, and he has even been criticised by his natural supporters, who claim the distancing effect of some of his postmodernist techniques has made his work too apolitical. However, Pamuk says the idea of writing a "Dostoyevskian political novel" was in his head while he was working on Snow. "In the late-70s I tried to write a political novel about people like me: upper-class or middle-class students who went with their families to summer houses but also played around with guns and Maoist texts and had fanciful ideas about throwing a bomb at the prime minister."

However in 1980, when the army responded to a parliamentary logjam, a deteriorating economy and widespread political violence by staging a coup and formally taking over the running of a country much of which was already under martial law, it was impossible to publish such a book.

Pamuk says that 18 years on the vogue for Marxism had passed, "and the interesting thing was political Islamists. I had lots of friends who secretly admired them. Many hard-core political Islamists learned a lot from Turkey's Marxist-Leninists because nationalism and anti-westernism are at the heart of both. It is a secret anthropological history how similar they are. So I decided to write another novel. I liked the idea of this town being cut off from the rest of Turkey by snow; and there is a military coup." Set in 1992, the novel is part love story, part political thriller and features a poet visiting a remote town in eastern Turkey under the pretext of a journalistic assignment. Pamuk used the same ruse to undertake his research and many of the details in the book reflect his own experiences in the town of Kars, including being picked up by the local police who were suspicious of his movements.

All Pamuk's novels have included autobiographical strands, but in his most recent book, Istanbul - published in Turkey late last year and due out in the UK in 2005 - he explicitly mixes memoir with his thoughts about the city. One of the chapters is about "The Rich", the social group into which he was born. "My grandfather was a rich person and my father's generation had much money, which they wasted. My childhood was full of my grandmother crying because my father or uncles were selling this or that. The family wealth came from building railroads in the 1930s. They were instigating the new Turkish republic and were literally building the nation. By the time I was growing up, the wealth was going down, but they still had the instincts of rich people. Even though my grandfather's money had evaporated, our lifestyle didn't change. But there were signs that the money was going and there were always feuds. People blamed other people all the time."

Pamuk was born in Istanbul in June 1952 and a description of the upper-class neighbourhood he grew up in can be found in the The Black Book. "I was meticulous and perhaps pompous; I wanted to be like James Joyce in getting every detail correct about which shops were there at the time. Before I was born my family had a large house, the ultimate Ottoman mansion, with the whole family in different parts of the building and lots of servants. But that disintegrated and they wanted to be western, so they built an apartment block for themselves where the main doors were locked but inside all the apartment doors were open, and I would walk between the apartments of my uncles and cousins and my grandmother. But as the money ran out they began to sell the apartments and my family eventually moved to a better one, but one they rented and didn't own." Pamuk has bought a flat in the original family block and lives there again.

His father, who died last year, was a businessman and a "failed poet" - "perhaps typical of second-generation wealth". Like the father figure in My Name is Red, he would periodically disappear from home. "He looked down on the Turkish literary scene but thought of Paris as a cool place to be so that's where he went," says Pamuk. "He married early and had chil dren and I think he regretted that. He wanted to carry on with his youth."

Pamuk's mother and elder brother, a professor of economics, still live in the city. There is tension between the brothers, says Pamuk, because in Istanbul he wrote about the beatings he received from his brother when they were children. "People thought that because I am an apparently successful, upper-class, happy person I wouldn't write about things like that. But it is in our culture and it was my right to write about it. And then the media latched on to it and it made headlines."

Pamuk and his brother attended the American school in Istanbul where they were taught in English and Turkish. The school catered for a social elite and has produced several Turkish prime ministers, but most of its alumni run Turkish industry and academia. "That sort of education makes you too secular and too westernised to properly stay in touch with traditional voters," says Pamuk.

Vedit Inal, now a lecturer in economics, was a school and college friend and remembers Pamuk as witty, a good student and a basketball player. "He hasn't changed much as a character. He was always able to look at things from an unusual angle. And at first he wanted to be a painter, not a writer."

Pamuk says he went through childhood being told he had a talent for painting, but the family tradition in engineering meant "that only things like engineering and mathematics counted. Religion, for example, was something just for the poor. The only time I was taken to the mosque was by my maid, when she went there to chat to her friends. The ruling westernised elite thought religion was one of the reasons for our glorious Ottoman empire's decline. But from the 60s they also saw it had an immense political power. If you showed the voters you were religious you got more votes and since then the upper classes have been scared of the lower classes and urban Turkey has been more religious." The arts and humanities were similarly disregarded and his family was not enthusiastic about the idea of him becoming a professional painter. "But instead of sending me to be a civil engineer, they thought because I was an arty guy perhaps I should be an architect."

When Pamuk went to university in Istanbul in 1970 it was a militant Marxist campus and he was on the left. "But although I was reading the literature of all these little Marxist factions, I never joined any, and I would go home and read Virginia Woolf. Although I had my sympathies, I saved my spirits by reading Woolf and Faulkner and Mann and Proust. I felt guilty but I also felt they were more interesting." Pamuk had been a prodigious reader of classic French, Russian and English fiction since childhood and after three years studying architecture, "suddenly announced that I wasn't going to go to school any more and I wasn't going to paint. I was going to write novels."

Freely says several contemporaries were, like Pamuk, interestingly quirky thinkers. "But while they fell by the way side, he pushed on and found out who he really was through his writing. And it was difficult. For families from his class engineering was everything. Of course there were quite a few of us interested in artistic things, but there was a very strong feeling that anyone with skills should put them in service of the country. His family were not happy at all about what he was doing but that wouldn't mean they didn't support him. Your family is your social security over there."

Pamuk says he received "pocket money" from his father until he was 32. "But even my father, who had translated Valéry, said I should stay on and finish that stupid architecture school. Their attitude was that all the artists and intellectuals in the country were doomed because there was not much interest in what they had to offer. And they were all drunks. So I worked very hard to make myself a novelist and finish my first book. I didn't want anyone to say - even though secretly I was saying it to myself - that I left school for nothing and was wasting my life."

Although a leftist himself he felt little sympathy with the socialist-sanctioned realism of Gorky or Steinbeck or some Turkish village novelists. "There were modernist poetry groups and magazines with which I sympathised but I didn't really develop any literary friendships in my 20s. I was arrogant and I looked down a little on them and thought they were a bit simplistic. Because of that it was a problem to publish my first book." It took him four years to complete Cevdet Bey and His Sons - "a family saga that is really about my grandfather making his money" - and although it won a competition to be published, Pamuk eventually had to sue the publisher before it finally appeared in print three years later. "Getting published in England and America and in 35 languages was easy compared with first getting published in Turkey," he laughs.

Throughout his time writing the novel, Pamuk had been enrolled in a journalism school just to put off his military service. But aged 30 in 1982, he did his spell in the military, and when he came out he married Aylin Turegen, a historian of Russian descent. Their daughter, Ruya, was born in 1991. The couple divorced three years ago. Cevdet Bey was published the same year as his marriage, followed the next year by The Quiet House.

Parla sees Pamuk "as a very conscious inheritor of the novelistic tradition, both with regards to Turkey and the west. It is no coincidence that he started his writing in a very classical format, that of the bildungsroman, in Cevdet Bey, and moved gradually through the modernism of Sessiz Ev (The Quiet House) to the post-colonial and post-modern works exemplified by The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, and My Name Is Red."

After the 1985 publication of his third novel, The White Castle, about a 17th-century Christian slave and his Muslim master who swap identities, the Pamuks moved to New York for three years so Aylin could study for a PhD at Columbia. Pamuk attended the Iowa writing school and taught a Turkish language class, but mostly he occupied a small room above the Col-umbia library where he began work on The Black Book, the contemporary story of a lawyer searching Istanbul for his lost wife.

"My cubicle was above three million books and I was very happy there," he says. "There was a good collection of Turkish books going back to the 1930s and many of them had not even had the pages cut. No one had ever looked at them before me." The publisher Keith Goldsmith, now with Knopf in New York, was working for Carcanet, the British publisher. He was recommended Pamuk's work by a Turkish friend and through him The White Castle became Pamuk's first book translated into English.

"Orhan was a very attractive character who was constantly chain-smoking, drinking coffee and speaking a mile a minute," says Goldsmith. "And it was plain that in his work, although it was cast in an historical period, he was addressing something of the essence of what was going on in the world today. He has obviously put his finger on something that relates to Turkey, but he has a resonance far beyond the place and the time he is apparently writing about. He is really a writer for the ages."

The books now sell worldwide and Pamuk says the initial impact of this was to make him more conscious of his Turkishness. "I was surprised that the word Turk was used as a sort of synonym for my name. Instead of writing 'Pamuk says this or that' they wrote that 'this Turkish author said this or that'. It did upset me a little. If I write an essay about Proust or Hemingway I might occasionally write about the French or American author, but not all the time. It seems if you write fiction in that part of the world your nationality is not that important, but if you write fiction in this part of the world your nationality and, even worse, ethnicity are important. When an English writer writes about a love affair he writes about humanity's love affair, but when I write about a love affair I am only talking about a Turk's love affair."

Pamuk says that as soon as he began to publish he realised he was expected to have an opinion on everything. "They would ask me what deodorants I used and I would answer them so I got a reputation for answering every question. For the first three or four years I didn't worry much about politics. The previous generation sneered at me as someone who became popular after a military coup. They implied my work was a product of that coup, which of course was not true. But although I was not in any party, I was still a leftist like them and as my fame grew, the new generation knew my opinions on things and especially on the Kurdish issue and on freedom of speech."

He, and two other Turkish novelists, Yasar Kemal and Aziz Nesin, were the first writers from a Muslim country to speak out against the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. "Three days later President Rafsanjani answered back from Tehran complaining that Iran's neighbours were siding with Rushdie, who had insulted the Prophet. I was famous by then, but not that famous. No one knew my address, so I didn't worry too much."

Following the success of The New Life, he agreed to sell a Kurdish newspaper on the streets after the bombing of its offices by, it was generally assumed, government agencies. Through much of the 80s and 90s, a civil war was fought in east and southeast Turkey between government forces and Kurdish rebels from the secessionist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Pamuk recalls a "horrific atmosphere" at the time and says that when some "leftists and liberals and Kurds who were not ultra-nationalist tried to do something against the war and they wanted to use me, I said OK."

The result was that he was called a "renegade" on the front page of a national newspaper, and sections of Turkish society and the state have never forgiven him.

Pamuk began to write controversial articles for German newspapers and, in the late 90s, he signed a statement with other writers and intellectuals calling the government's Kurdish policy "a huge mistake". The government offered him an olive branch with the accolade of "state artist", but Pamuk refused it, saying that if he accepted, he couldn't "look in the face of people I care about".

He now says the Kurds lost that war, which he thought "was bad for Turkey. There should have been concessions from both sides to reach a peace. That would have saved so much time and would have been much better for the country. I just hope that over time the Turks forget some of their Turkishness and Kurds forget some of their Kurdishness. And my dream of Europe is something that can do that."

"He has been courageous about human-rights issues," says Freely, "and has been very lucky not to have spent time in prison for his views. Any classmate of ours who was remotely interested in politics ended up in prison at some time or other. The fact that he can get away with saying things about the state because of his international reputation makes the obligation greater for him to do so when he can. And there is a sense that the human rights issue has to be addressed before they stand any chance of joining the European Union."

Inal says that writers have an unusual mission in Turkey. "They are not just people working in their rooms. People ask them about social and political events and they have to respond. He has to give a provocative response so that people can look at things from different angles. Personally he is a loner and would prefer to be at home working and thinking about nothing more than writing. But he knows he also has a mission and he takes his social and political responsibilities seriously."

"People say I must have had great self-confidence to continue for so long without being published," he says. "Perhaps that is true, but in fact I had burnt my boats and could not go back. I knew I had to reach that shore and this is how I have done it.

"There are writers like Nabokov and Naipaul and Conrad who exchanged their civilisations and nations and even languages. It is a very cherished and fashionable idea in literature and so in a sense I am embarrassed that I have done none of this. I have lived virtually in the same street all my life and I currently live in the apartment block where I was brought up. But this is how it has to be for me and this is what I do. And look at my view. From here it is not so difficult to see the world."